


skeletons have no shoulders (clay mugs are stronger than thought)

by Treha



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Edward Elric Is A Little Shit, Edward Elric Swears, Gen, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Mature Edward Elric, Out of Character, Overuse of the word golden and various permutations thereof, Pre-Slash, no beta we die like characters with dead anime mum hair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:00:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24770455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Treha/pseuds/Treha
Summary: Roy Mustang is many things and that's great, that's fine, until it isn't. Ed simply doesn't have time for anyone's bullshit.::In which it boils down to a midnight conversation between someone surprisingly broken, and someone else surprisingly not.
Relationships: Edward Elric & Roy Mustang, Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 5
Kudos: 103





	skeletons have no shoulders (clay mugs are stronger than thought)

The thing is, you see, that Roy Mustang is not really Roy Mustang. He is Colonel, or Colonel Bastard, or Sir, or Chief, or Mustang My Boy, or You’re the New One, or I’ve Seen You on the Papers, or Roy-Boy, or Mass Murderer, or Hero of Ishval, or Flame, or Cocky Asshole, or Pretentious Upstart, or City Boy, or Most Eligible Bachelor, or State Alchemist, or—

Roy Mustang looks at himself in the mirror every morning when he wakes up, and sees fifty different men staring back at him. (When he doesn’t see fifty thousand men and women and children and babies screaming at him, flesh sloughing off, bones crumbling, eyeballs drip-drip-dripping—)

He’s used to it. He owns it. He grew up a half-race who doesn’t remember losing his parents, and then learnt his alphabet alongside people drugged out of their minds, practiced his times-tables at night while people moaned and smacked the wall the next room over. Roy Mustang doesn’t really know who he is at heart—at one point, maybe, he was an idealistic boy who took a look at all the blood and all the war and thought _I’ll be the hero!_ Maybe he was once a mass murderer, sanctioned by four little numbers and a grandfatherly smile, snapping his fingers and watching the flames. Maybe he still is. Maybe he is Colonel Roy Mustang, with ambition to reach the sky and tear this country down to its deepest, darkest roots so that he may build it up again, so that it can breathe without choking on its own bloody history. (Like he does.) He doesn’t mind, not knowing. He’s fluid. Adaptive. Learns fast, quick hands, quicker mind, pretty eyes, exotic face.

And then—

* * *

Berthold sneers and smacks one of leaking burns on his leg with his cane. “Foolish, foolish boy. Fire is easy to start. Any idiot with a matchstick could start a fire. The difficulty is in the _control_.”

Roy bites back his scream as the cane digs into his wound. One moment of distraction, one moment of broken concentration, one flash—he had come close, he would later hear from the doctor, to causing irreparable damage to the nerves.

“Do not forget!” Berthold barks out, even as he watches his apprentice writhe on the ground. “We are flame alchemists not because we start fires, but because we can control them!”

Roy gasps, clenching his fists so he does not try to knock away the cane that is now smeared in his blood. Trying to stop Berthold in one of his moods is never a good idea. He would know.

Berthold Hawkeye snorts. “We destroy. Fire destroys. Nothing more, nothing less. Get a bucket of water.”

* * *

“I will shoot you, Sir, the day I see you stray off your path,” Riza Hawkeye promises, eyes dark and grim and her hands are almost dainty, for the thousands they have shot.

“Then I suppose you had better be in a position to do so,” Roy remarks back, rubbing his fingers inside his pockets and wondering if he sets himself alive what the newspapers will say.

Maes lays a hand on his shoulder, heavy. “Now then, both of you must try Gracia’s apple pie—why, it’ll melt perfectly on your tastebuds!”

* * *

“Are you going to sit here and mope, then?” he snarls, vicious, poisonous, as he stares at a little boy in a wheelchair with limp hair and empty eyes. “Let your _own_ mistake take your own life—take the coward’s way out, run, like the little boy you are, so arrogant, so _stupid_?”

There is a flash, there—something brilliant, something that _burns_ but…oh, no, not like Ishval, not at all. Not like the searing, screaming wails of his own fires, adorning his dirty hands. Instead it is the stoked fire of the core of a star, golden and gleaming, the eyes of a predator in the body in a broken eleven-year-old. It is potential, where his is pain.

Edward Elric takes a breath in, and says, quietly, “I can’t run anymore, can I?” He smoothes a tiny, tiny hand over the gaping space where his left leg should be.

Roy picks him up by the shirt— _this is wrong,_ his mind screams, _this is WRONG,_ his body rebels: this boy is meant for passion and sunlight, meant for leaps of brilliance nobody could match, meant for supernova-bright and aureate-precious. He shakes the boy, yells at him, because something in his heart twists and twists and tightens—

It is the last time, Roy will later realise, for a very long time that Edward Elric is anything other than strength and vitality and _life_ in human form.

* * *

Roy assembles his team from all over the place: shy Fuery and unlucky Havoc, stoic Falman and jovial Breda, efficient Hawkeye and charismatic, undeniable, prodigy Mustang.

(Prodigy, his own soul spits, what a waste of a word. No. Prodigy does not apply to him, who only knows how to burn, how to destroy. Prodigy applies to two golden boys in a town with more sheep than people, prodigy and genius and savant and pioneer and inventor— _alchemy is a difficult science!_ everyone cries, pouring over old textbooks and using straight-edges to draw their runes. _Alchemy is art_ , says two brothers, a forest springing to life underneath their child-like palms, houses rebuilt in a day and broken things fixed. Fixed.)

He picks his pieces and he hoards them close, carries the mask of a womaniser and a slacker and sneaks his paperwork out to do at midnight or one in the morning and pretends he’s doodling love hearts and not arrays for sucking oxygen out of someone’s lungs; _slacker Mustang,_ they say, they sneer, _who does everything by doing nothing at all._

He revels in it, in the knowledge and the control and the power. Because the opposite—

(fire, fire, fire, bullets from overhead and knives gleaming in desert sun, blood spraying, a child begging them to save her brother, a soldier reaching forward to agree, and then a dirty shirt is lifted and there are bombs strapped to his ribs, fire—firefirefire _firefirefire_ )

The opposite is unacceptable.

* * *

“Th’fuck?” an irritated voice grinds out. Roy swings around, one finger already poised to snap—oh god, he has his gloves on, why does he have his gloves on, nonono, he’s going to burn the house, his best friend and his darling wife, little Elicia and her gap-toothed smiles, the brothers, _they are all here_ —and Ed merely raises an unimpressed eyebrow. His hair is a dandelion-spiky mess that spills over his ears and shoulders, but it gleams golden and true even in the weak dimness of the Hughes’ living room. The alchemist knocks away Roy’s still-raised hand (weapon) and shoulders his way bodily into the kitchen.

He takes a few breaths. “I wonder,” he says, finally, snatching his hand back and tucking it into the pockets of whatever coat he had shrugged on in the dark, “if it has ever occurred to you the proven scientific causation between a proper circadian rhythm and an individual’s height may also apply to adolescent boys.”

Ed tosses him a snarl over his shoulder, but it’s ruined by the way he has to squint into the darkness to fumble for a glass. The moonlight is weak and watery, but enough all the same to see. “Fuck off, asshole. It’s like three-fuckin’-am, and I sure as hell ain’t dealin’ with your bullshit right now.”

In the middle of the night, when the only sounds are the pipes rattling in the walls and the trees whispering their discontent outside, so very far away, Roy cannot quite seem to find his fifty personalities.

The tap runs, the glass fills.

Ed turns to him, one hip cocked. His eyes are far too intelligent. When people first meet the Fullmetal Alchemist, they think the danger lies in his metal limbs. When they come to know him slightly better, they think the danger lies in his circle-less alchemy or propensity for collateral damage. Roy knows better. Edward Elric’s truly dangerous weapon has always been and will always be his blade-sharp mind. This is the first time Roy has been under the full brunt of its honed edge, and it seems to skitter over his drawn-tight skin and through his rushing blood like sparks of electricity.

Roy tries to ignore this, ignore him, as he moves to get another glass. (He has a mug. It says 'Uncle Roy', in misshapen letters and badly crafted clay. It sits in the back of one of the cupboards, likely with a layering of dust. He had said to Maes once, _I can’t use this, everybody and their soccer-mother neighbour knows the clay used in children’s arts and crafts is far from industry dishwasher standards._ Maes had been kind enough not to point out all their dishes are hand-washed, and that Elicia’s school had used genuine craft clay. Maes had also been kind enough to not tell him to take it to his own apartment.)

“The dead stay dead, y’know,” Ed says, out of nowhere.

Roy stiffens.

He hasn’t forgotten. Ed, missing an arm and missing a leg, Al, empty and clanking and hollow, a dusty basement and a trail of blood. A circle and a condemnation.

“You would know,” he bites out, acidic. Then swallows, and cannot quite get out the mute _sorry_ stuck in his lungs. This is who he is without his fifty Roy Mustangs – a bitter, lost man who takes it out on anyone around because he cannot bear his own pain.

“The dead don’t give a fuck,” Ed continues, as if Roy has not just tried to pry open a wound so deep and bloody that it carries itself in missing limbs, as if either of them don't know how deeply it haunts him with every missing beat of his brother’s steel heart, “it’s us living that gotta carry their weight.”

The silence stretches.

Roy says, finally, “What are you getting at?” He is tired. He does not have time for this strange Ed, deceptively gentle with a terrible, echoing understanding slanting through his gaze. He would have once. He would have seen it as another puzzle to pick apart, perhaps, or a side to a subordinate that he would take care to treat with respect, maybe. Now, he is always tired.

Ed finishes the rest of his water in one long draw, shrugging as he turns to set the glass in the sink. Roy would make a jab about manners and guest courtesies, but Maes had lamented at length and at depth about how difficult it had been to get the Elric brothers into his house in the first place. Melodramatically, of course, complete with tears and unrelated photos of Elicia, but Roy had seen the underlying thread of genuine concern.

They are teenagers both, Ed and Al. But they have traded ignorance for knowledge. There is nothing left in them but the faintest impression of youth, found only in Al’s high voice or in Ed’s short stature. Roy will not kid himself – he may not have shoved a uniform three sizes too large onto Edward’s frame and then celebrated having a pet child soldier under his command, no; but he had placed a silver pocket watch into too-small hands and known that by the nature of the situation, his knowledge of their taboo was already a collar firmer than any military-granted authority. Sometimes, Roy thinks the only thing stopping Riza from shooting him in the head is the way Ed dents the walls whenever he kicks in their office doors.

“What I’m gettin’ at, you dumb fuck,” Ed says, and Roy nearly startles, had lost himself in the silence and his own mind, almost forgotten the frayed threads of a conversation grounded in the reality of an early morning heart-to-heart with his unusual subordinate, “is that if you don’t let yourself move on some day, your old man spine is gonna crumble to dust under it all.”

Roy takes a deep breath in, then out. “You cannot move on from a body count in the thousands, Fullmetal,” he grits out. “You may call me a bastard until the sun goes down, but even I am not so heartless—,”

“I ain’t telling you to _forget_ the shit you did,” Ed cuts in, as violently as he does anything else. “That’s fucked up, duh. Yeah, you killed people. Yeah, you’ll spend the rest of your life making up for it—but that’s the whole fucking point, dumbass. You take that weight and drag it with you every goddamn day. You don’t get to stop.”

“Not all of us have the same spectacular ability to ignore our own _short_ comings,” Roy throws back, “which has just been displayed beautifully if you are emotionally _stunted_ enough to weigh a single life against a thousand. Basic mathematics, Fullmetal.”

Even as he says it, he regrets it. Many have looked at Ed’s volatile temper and overreactions and loud personality only to dismiss him all too easily as a foul-mouthed brat with a little too much alchemical know-how and a little too-little anything else. Others see it as a mask for a boy that must be broken underneath—surely, surely, after all he had been through, he would be cracked within. Roy knows it is neither. Ed is pure gold, through and through. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and he extends that very arm to anyone and any situation he meets, even as he mutters curses and rolls his eyes and ignores any form of social grace. Ed has seen the worst of humanity, has looked into the abyss of grotesque deeds (half-dog, half-child, white fur, brown hair), has gone out and watched towns tear themselves apart over empty words, has uncovered four-century old conspiracies to turn an entire nation into a feeding bowl to an immortal monster, and still he holds out his hands. He looks at the shadows, and then smirks and claps and lights up the very world in ozone flashes of brilliant lightning. Ed stares at the reminder of his own near-literal deal with the devil in the mirror every day, and he only pulls his mismatched shoulders back and takes another heavy step on his own path to redemption.

Ed knows who he is; too brash, too young, too loud, too powerful, too much, and he owns it. It is not ignorance. With the Elrics, it is never ignorance.

Sure enough, the boy himself merely scoffs. Roy refuses to flinch under his golden glare. “Fuck off, Mustang. We both know you’re trying to run me off, and the goddamn Fuhrer himself wouldn’t be able to do that. I ain’t saying you gotta be happy-dandy all the fuckin’ time, but you’ve been off for weeks now. Even Hawkeye looks like she’s boutta start loading her gun with happy drugs instead of bullets.”

Roy blinks, surprised. Is—is Ed _worried_ about him?

“Look,” Ed says, tilting his head, and half of Roy’s brain promptly loses track of any rationality and fixates on the way his flaxen hair turns into something molten and gleaming in the moonlight, “shit’s fuckin’ hard, yeah? You did shit that won’t or can’t ever be forgiven, but that doesn’t mean it cancels out all the prissy-pants good-shit you’re doing now.” Another part of Roy’s brain dies an ignoble death at the vocabulary of the genius before him. “Al’s always said forgiveness can’t be earnt, only gifted, and he’s fuckin’ smarter than me so listen to him, you dumb shit. Don’t bother wading through all the political bullshit while thinking it’s to make amends or some other fucked up idea.”

Ed steps closer. His automail arm, bared in the kitchen with Ed only wearing a tank-top, catches the street lamps outside. Roy resists the urge to step back.

A flesh-and-blood finger stabs at his chest. “Open your fucking eyes, bastard. You can’t carry a thousand lives on your back.” Roy has a newfound respect for all the criminals that the Fullmetal Alchemist has hunted before. If they had been pinned by a similar gaze, clear and sharp and utterly remorseless as it grabs hold of his soul and twists, Roy thinks they deserve a point or two. “You don’t get that fuckin’ _privilege._ Stop thinkin’ you’re the fuckin’ boogeyman, Mustang. You’re just a sad fuck-up who did shit in the past. Shit that, might I remind your empty-as-fuck nutshell you call a brain, was carried out on the orders of a system that would’ve shot you then had some even grosser bastard step in and do your job in a day anyway. You’re human, dumbass.”

Roy has to work his throat for a moment before he can respond. “Some would say ‘human’ is dirty enough on its own.”

Ed socks him in the arm. Still with his flesh hand, thankfully. Roy is not about to explain an automail-fist-shaped bruise to Maes tomorrow morning. Or today morning.

“A word’s a fucking word, you pretentious dick. The point is—,”

“No, I understand,” Roy interrupts, because if he hears any more of Edward Elric looking at his demons and understanding them and then picking them apart, he might just leap out the Hughes’ front window. And then they’d bill him with the repairs and it’d go through Riza and she’d shoot him in his left arm so he can still do his paperwork in the hospital.

Ed eyes him like a particularly slow dog. “Sure,” he drawls out, but leaves it at that.

Roy sighs, scrubs a hand—still gloved, dammit—down his face and turns around. He only has parts of his brain still functioning at this point, which must be why he then pauses and very nearly says something as useless or as condescending as _sorry_. Then he would have to explain the automail-foot-shaped bruise on his back.

As it is, Ed clamps a strong hand around his arm, and says, “Five-twenty cens, bastard. Alchemists don’t get to give up.”

“Oh, and here you had just called me human if I remember correctly—,”

“Shut the fuck up, bastard. Alchemists are human, and the day you forget that is the day I transmute you into a shitty doorknob,” Ed scowls back easily, again pushing past Roy to step into the hallway. Roy would consider him physically incapable of not waiting like a normal person to enter or exit a room with someone else in front of them, if it weren’t for the way he can still feel the brand of Ed’s fingers against his arm.

Five flesh fingers. And with it, Fullmetal has already done more than what the majority of people with double that amount of flesh fingers could ever dream to do. The day Ed has both arms back—the day it happens, because Roy is sure of very, very few things but the Elric’s success has always been one of them, the world is probably going to have to let go of some of its laws of science and nature. Amestris is going to have to let go of some court laws, for sure. Nobody could stop the Fullmetal Alchemist from literally single-handedly bringing down buildings like they had personally opened their brick-mouths to call him short. Nobody’s going to be able to stop him from _anything_ once he has both.

“You’re enough,” Ed says, again seemingly apropos of nothing, but the golden stare Roy receives when he startles up to look at him on the stairs says it all.

 _I am not entirely certain a teenager with half his limbs who blushed the other day when someone mistyped the number six into sex can judge my worth,_ is what Roy wants to say.

“Well, if the genius Alchemist of the People says so, then perhaps there may be some truth behind the sentiment,” is what comes out, far more shakily than he’d like it to.

Ed doesn’t even roll his eyes. He only tosses his back over his shoulders with a twist of his head. “Go the fuck to sleep, dumbass.”

* * *

Roy can count all his genuine friends on one hand. Half a hand, actually. Riza, Maes. Riza had been his pillar for almost longer than he could remember. A smart girl who had pulled him out of his studies when he forgot to eat. A partner who had covered his back over rolling sands. An adjutant that had gotten him through a near bloodless coup of an entire country. Maes, then, had been his compass since he had started climbing the ladder. A fellow student who had taken one look at the outcast Xingese-looking recruit in the military academy, and promptly adopted him. A counterpart who had always supported his insane dreams of changing the very system. An advisor that acted as not only as his confidante but also his voice of reason and conscience.

A few years down the line, when Roy has many more stars and stripes on his shoulders, he will add another to the extremely limited list.

Ed, who even initially at twelve-years-old and far too easy to rile up had always been the first and fastest to call out his bullshit. Ed, with his golden hair and golden eyes and golden heart, who may not have spilt as much blood as Roy but understood him in a way that neither Riza nor Maes truly did, who could look past the fifty Roy Mustangs to find the hurting man beneath it all. Ed, who would get up at three in the morning just to steal his glasses of water, or who would alchemically pick his lock on his bad days and drag him all the way to the dog park and then laugh uproariously as Roy got trampled, or who would drain all his brandy and whiskey and then have a shouting match that lasted well into the night and then bodily lock Roy into his own bedroom to sleep.

* * *

“Don’t these sparkly shits get heavy as fuck?”

“Sparkly what—ah, you mean my various badges and medals? My insignia of rank? The representation of my position in the beast that is the Amestrian military, a signifier of authority and— _don’t rip them off!_ ”

“What? I’ll just fuckin’ transmute them back on later, I wanna see.”

“You can _see_ them if they are still attached to my uniform, you infuriating rascal.”

“Yeah, but I can see ‘em better like this. Woah, shit, this one’s kinda heavy, the fuck is this one?”

“Ed, darling dearest, star of my life— _oof_ —that medal was from the Promised Day. You received one too, remember? In fact, you received the first one. Please tell me you have not lost it down some unsuspecting drain to be nibbled on by rats until it is eventually unearthed centuries into the future by adventurous archaeologists. Ed.”

“Did I? Fuck, whatever. It’s, what, a gold-copper alloy? I’ll make another if you’re so sad about it, geez.”

“That is so incredibly far from the point, which I am sure you fully comprehend, you imp.”

“Are imps short?”

“…No.”

“Good.”

“Putting this all aside, let us return to your original question. Yes, Ed, they might be heavy—”

“Fuckin’ called it! No way you got your shoulders from lifting the piles of paperwork you never goddamn do.”

“While I am flattered you appreciate my shoulders, please refrain from mentioning paperwork in this house. I might have to move.”

“Pansy-ass sucker.”

“ _Returning_ to the point, they might be heavy, Ed, because you have taught me about shouldering things - but they are not a burden. It is the hefty weight of privilege, if anything.”

“Huh?”

“I may not be strong enough to carry the lives of a thousand and six-hundred people, but I am—I will be strong enough to carry the voices of those left behind.”

“Not bad, old man. At this rate, I might start believing all those dumbasses in the paper praising your apparent brain.”

“You _gremlin_ —,”

“A-fucking-ha! I know a gremlin is short, you bastard—GET BACK HERE!”

“Remember to put my medals back on my uniform, dear!”

“ROY—!”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. FMA is such a masterpiece I'm still revisiting it a decade later. The characters are not paper cut-outs, and their struggles are not contrived, even if perhaps this fic may seem so. Mustang in particular is a fascinating character, while I maintain that Edward could tear the fabric of reality apart and everyone should thank him. I have not included or excluded the possibility of a relationship in this fic, and leave it to how you wish to perceive it. The original material has its share of humour and comedy, but I'm afraid I'm not great with that, so feel free to pretend everyone is in neon pink tutus if that adds to the fic for you.
> 
> This takes place at undetermined time during a slightly canon divergent timeline. Maes is alive, the conspiracy has been uncovered but not yet stopped, and Ed has not yet reached twenty but is mature enough in the ways it matters here.
> 
> (✿╹◡╹)


End file.
